3. Judas PriestUnleashed In The East (Live In Japan)
Another great live record. Once I started playing the guitar, Judas Priest was one of those bands that went immediately into my playlist, although back then there were obviously no playlists, as we know them now. It was just a case of what vinyl you had. The band that I was in prior to Metallica, a band called Panic, had a guy called Dave Harmon playing in it. He was a huge Judas Priest fan and while we were trying to get that first Panic formation together, he and I would jam ‘Victim Of Changes’ over and over again. To me it was the heaviest thing I’d heard in my life up to that point. I think we all have our own idea of what a great twin guitar attack is. I always loved K. K. Downing. I haven’t seen Priest with this new cat that’s in the band, but the key to the dual guitar is how the two interrelate. In Thin Lizzy, for example, the riffs were a little happy. In Iron Maiden they were somewhere in the middle. But with Priest they were a lot darker and I always gravitated towards that.
Regarding the rumours that the record was heavily overdubbed, I never heard that and frankly I don’t care. We have had to fix some live performances and whenever you say that people automatically assume that you did it because your performance wasn’t good or that you want to fake a really great performance. But sometimes stuff just happens. For example, we did a live broadcast of a show in Mesa, Arizona during the Cryptic Writings era. They went ahead and released a live show and I had not heard it. They said: "Just trust us." I had never let anything go out unapproved up until that point and the one time I did it, I noticed that one of the kick drums was turned off. And also David Ellefson’s background vocals were completely missing. I thought: "I will never let this happen again." Sometimes you get into the studio and hear that things are wrong, like a microphone is inverted and it sounds like it was recorded in a fishbowl. But are you going to shitcan all the audio and video just for that? No, you fix it. But if you’re going in there and replacing stuff because you play like shit live, then that’s different.
